My journey through the world of e-Learning and knowledge sharing. This blog contains my personal views but is also written from my perspective as CEO of Easygenerator

8 reasons why your authoring tool must be in the cloud

All software and data will move to the cloud sooner or later. In this post I will explain why you should move to the cloud rather sooner than later. I have chosen 8 reasons that should convince you.

1. No IT hustle

All the software lives in the cloud and is maintained and cared for by the vendor. Your IT department does not has any involvement, neither you nor the IT department has to install anything. No time consuming processes here, just login via your browser and start.

2. Collaboration

Creating e-Learning is, like many other tasks, a team effort. And the cloud is made to collaborate. Because all the data is in one place, authors from any location can access it and work on it. Collaboration has never been easier.

3. Review possibilities

Whatever kind of content you create, you have to have it reviewed before you can publish it. Reviewing can be a daunting task if you are not in the cloud. You have to send files to reviewers, they will put their remarks in a separate document and you have to connect these remarks to your content and process them. Reviewing in the cloud is way easier. In Easygenerator for example, you can create a link to your course and share that link with your reviewers. When a reviewer clicks that link he will see your course or quiz in the way a learner would see it, but there is one addition; they can add remarks. In Easygenerator a reviewer can place remarks next to each title, text or image. All these remarks will be fed back to the author. As an author you will see all remarks in context and you can process them swiftly.

4. Accessibility

Since all data is in the cloud it is easy to access it, but it is also possible to access it with any device. The only requirements is that you have an internet connection. You can start on your PC, continue on your tablet, do some work on your cell phone and finish on your Mac. No problem. And this goes of course also for all people you collaborate with. All boundaries between devices will disappear once you are in the cloud.

5. Security

For many people this is the main reason to doubt cloud based solutions. The funny thing is that cloud based solutions are much more secure than any local stored system:

Data in the cloud floats over many servers, it is not tied to one specific server. No server crash, fire or any other disaster can make you lose any work. The moment you have entered the data it really is secure.

Cloud based storage is much more difficult to hack than a physical server or PC. Since everything floats around it is much harder for them to find and target your data.

I already described how you can review content on the cloud. Just think of this for a moment. Instead of sending your content via email (one of the most risky things you can do) and sending it to someone that works on a PC that might or might not have a virus scanner, your content remains in the same location in the cloud and you give people controlled access.

6. Always up to date

Software is being improved all the time. Features added, bugs removed, improvements made. If you work with installed software on a PC there will be updates once or twice a year. Next to the hassle to download the update and get it installed, it will very often cost you extra money. With cloud services that process is easier and cheaper. Easygenerator for example will update the software every week and you don’t have to do anything, we do all the work. This makes it possible that we have a fix for a bug reported on Wednesday, solved on Thursday.

7. Cost

Many cloud based services have a subscription based model, while most installed software will have a licensing model. Subscription tends to be cheaper (lower prices that do include hosting, maintenance, updates and service) while installed software most of the time charge you a one-time license fee, followed by costs for updates or upgrades. Next to being cheaper it is also more flexible to have a subscription in the cloud. You can cancel or pause any time you want (most of the times on a monthly basis)

8. Support

If you run into any trouble weather it is a functional problem or a bug, help is always near in the cloud. Easygenerator has for example a built in support app that will connect you directly to our support team. And you can give us access to your data (for example by adding us as a co-author). This makes our support process much faster and effective.

Not yet convinced?

Try it out for yourselves. Another advantage of cloud based tools is that many of them have a free trial, no strings attached. If you want to test drive Easygenerator, just click here, sign up and experience the advantage of a cloud based solution within seconds.